Song Exploder - Arcade Fire - Put Your Money On Me

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

Arcade Fire is a Grammy-winning six-piece band originally from Montreal. They’ve released five albums, and the last three have all debuted at number one on the charts. In this episode, singer Win Butler takes apart "Put Your Money On Me," from their 2017 album Everything Now. He breaks down how the influence of Marvin Gaye, Harry Nilsson, and ABBA all helped shape how the song eventually turned out. You’ll hear the original demo, and an alternate version of the song that was never finished. The story begins when Win and his wife and bandmate Régine Chassagne moved to New Orleans. songexploder.net/arcade-fire

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Arcade Flyer is a Grammy-winning six-piece band, originally from Montreal. They've released five albums, and the last three have all debuted at number one on the charts. In this episode, singer Wyn Butler takes apart, Put Your Money on Me, from their 2017 album, Everything Now. The story of the song began when Wynne and his wife and bandmate, Regine Chessang, moved to New Orleans. I'm Wyn Butler.

I play an arcade fire. We built a new studio in New Orleans, which I've kind of begun to recognize as part of the process of making a record. We always end up kind of putting a new studio together, and somehow in making the space, there's this kind of period where you're just plugging things in and seeing how they work,

and you accidentally end up writing a bunch of music. And so the beginning of the song was around when I first got an 808 drum machine and was just kind of plugging it in and just got really excited about how it was sounding. We did a tour where we played these small venues and played all new material, and then I would usually DJ after,

and I just had so much fun. But the thing that was really interesting was I found it really forced me to listen to a lot more music and then listened to it really loud and a really big PA, which is something I wasn't doing in my day-to-day life. Like sexual healing. The first time I heard that in a real club system, it was like, what?

That's what that sounds like. There's a little bit of guitar, but the backing track is just an 808 drum machine. The drums on that song sounds so good. And so I was realizing that you could do that with that instrument. We have this synth called a CS80, which is just a beautiful, archaic piece of hardware. It's most famous for the Blade Runner soundtrack.

You can hear it in the demo. I was just kind of playing the bass loop on one hand, and then there's this high kind of like, do-de-d-d-dood-doo-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-... That I was making just by pulling the slider, like adding harmonics to the bass line. So it was all basically just one track. It's a beautiful sound, but it's really out of tune

if you ever try to add any other instruments. Like, if it's by itself, it's perfect, and then it just was like, wow, I guess no other instruments. I guess no other instruments can be in this song. So we ended up kind of recreating that, using three cents to make the sound that had been coming out of that one CS80. The sounds, they kind of like little bleep,

the bleep-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop kind of made me think of like a casino. Regina and I were hanging out, and we went down to the Harris Casino in New Orleans and just recorded a bunch of slot machines cashing out and weird little bleeps and bloops and kind of ambient sounds. It's an iPhone recording of the casino. I was born in Northern California, kind of near Reno, like right on the border of Nevada.

And my mom and dad, in my early life, spent a lot of time in these really burned out Nevada towns. I remember being a little kid and being in this crazy casino hearing the slot machines, and there's something really magical about that sound. As a little kid, it just, it's one of my first times being aware of sound. It sounded so crazy. And so I had this real deep childhood association with that feeling that sound, and it's like kind of somewhere between sadness and joy.

And so we just recorded a bunch of slot machines and ended up putting that on top of the demo. And then all of a sudden, it just had this kind of magical, otherworldly feeling. Right after we did the field recording and put it on. I remember going outside and pretty much just wrote

all the lyrics very, very fast. The feeling that the song was evoking was kind of this burned out science fictiony casino world. And so I was sort of channeling

just being a crooner in one of those casinos and like stepping up to the mic. You know, like backlit, cowboy hat, people playing slot machines and bringing drinks to people and singing in that context.

When you put your... It's like a love song from the perspective of someone who has been through a lot. If there was a race, a race for your heart, I started before you were born. Above the chloroform sky, clouds made of ambient, sitting on carpets in the basement of heaven. My mom is Mormon. I grew up in Mormon church. And when you were in Sunday school, there would be these ideas of what heaven's like, and it always seems. so strange to me. You know, like, as a kid, you're trying to picture what that actually was. So I think there's, like, a little bit of that in there, too.

Trumpets of angels call for my head, but I fight through the ether, and I quit when I'm dead. If you want to know, who'll be there in the end. When you bury me, baby, it'll still be your friend. The original demo really sounded great, but it didn't really sound like an arcade fire song. We tried to work just with that And it didn't There was too much information there already For the band to really inhabit it

And make it its own thing And so we decided to do a couple of shows in Europe Just to kind of get the blood flowing a little bit We kind of had an instinct That it would be good for us to remember what we're doing Which is playing live music So we booked a couple shows And then at the end we went to Paris for two weeks

With Tomah Toma is one half of Daft Punk and Daft Punk has this amazing studio in Paris that's like one of the last vintage 70s analog studios so we booked these two weeks and we worked on Put Your Money on Me again you would think Toma is like all about electronic music

he doesn't actually really like electronic music and he's very like academic and very like deep and philosophical and I think it was fun for him just to help us try to get clear on what we wanted to accomplish with the song. He was really pushing us to try to translate it, figure out how it makes sense with the band. Sort of like Gary Nielsen, everybody's talking at me. Everybody's talking at me.

I don't hear words of saying, only the echoes of my mind. Which, like, on paper, kind of makes sense for this song. And so there's a whole version. of it that's much more of like a classic country sort of vibe. We took it pretty far, like we worked on it a lot, but it just wasn't right. Intellectually, it kind of made sense,

but it just wasn't right, you know, it wasn't that song. It kind of was not happening, like the song wasn't going to make the record. It was like, oh well, we couldn't figure out that one. And we're kind of done with the studio. We have maybe half a day left. be half a day left after two weeks. And Regine really insisted, she's like, we got to play, put your money on me again.

And so we went back to the original demo. We're like, that's the feel. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Like, that's how it goes. That ended up being the template for the song. But we ended up losing the drum machine and putting real drums in it. Jeremy Guerra plays drums.

And there's this kind of like rolling high hat thing which Jeremy was playing. And instead of having him do that, I just had him play just the one note. and we got the rolling tape delay, which kind of gives this more electronic kind of lilt. And it was just reducing, like, what's the simplest thing you can do? Instead of, like, banging the hell of it,

what's the most minimal thing you can possibly do? It's one of my favorite drum performances Jeremy's ever done on a record, even though it's kind of the most simple. The first time we jammed on the song with the band, my brother Will played, like, this little synth hook. And it just stuck. That just became the part.

Will's the sort of player that he usually will come up with his idea like pretty much right out of the gate. And then the rest of us take like a year to figure it out. And Will's like, but I did my part a year ago. Richard, Reed Perry plays guitar. Richard is like a very atmospheric player. He was responding to the casino soundscape.

Like if you open those two tracks, it sounds like it's part of the same universe. The whole thing is kind of building to the chorale. It's like the really full-on kind of disco singing part. Sing it. Put your money, all your money on me. I know it's not the last time. Put your money on me. Regine really had a vision on the harmonies for the song,

and it's very classic Abba sort of vocal harmonies. But kind of fitting with this futuristic landscape of the song, there's a little bit of an android singing Abba part. And then there's acoustic guitar. Tim Kingsbury. Use this kind of Nashville guitar tuning, which is where you take just the high strings of a 12th string. And we ended up really pushing that a lot in the corral,

and it's super essential. Really kind of drives a song forward. Put your money on all your money on me. I know it's not the last time. Put your money on all your money on me. I know it's not easy. And then there's pedal steel. We recorded that in New Orleans with Daniel Lenoir,

who was in town for Jazz Fest, and he came by the studio. He kind of has a system where he has like a sampler so he can play a note and hit it. and it'll just hold forever so that they have infinite decay. It's like very kind of sci-fi-sounding version of a pedal steel. I remember watching my grandpa Vino play the pedal steel guitar in Lake Tahoe at Harrah's casino.

Whenever you're in a casino, it's very melancholy because there's people winning, but most people are losing. So it's like even in the victory, there's like one table over if someone's just lost their house or is doing something they shouldn't be doing. So it's like really a nod to the whole emotional atmosphere of the whole thing. It ended up better than I could have hoped. It's kind of a thing that happens sometimes when there's something really cool in a demo and you get stuck on the demo.

I mean, that's what's hard about making records, is that it's half lightning in a bottle that if you missed it, it's gone. And sorry that you weren't paying attention. And then the rest is like this meticulous thing that can take years to figure out There's always something magic in there that you're chasing. And this was an example where we were kind of suffering from that, but through pushing through it, ended up going somewhere a lot more interesting, I think. And now here's Put Your Money on Me by Arcade Fire in its entirety.

It's at SongExploder.net to learn more about Arcade Fire and for links to buy or stream their song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs.

And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city,

like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, Clion, and more, they're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishi-kash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's song-exploder.net slash live. Thanks. If you heard about a sponsor in this episode, and you want to learn more,

you can always go to songexploder.net slash sponsors to find all the current offers available to song Exploder listeners. This episode was produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. The illustrations on the Song Exploder website are by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all the shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. I'd love to to hear your thoughts on this episode. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.